See on Scoop.it – Data journalism
Do you need to reformat data for use in another application? Use it for an interactive Web graphic?
A good list of the JavaScript libraries available for data visiualisation including well known ones like Raphael and DS3.
See on www.ma-no.org
Note: I’m trying something new. I share a lot of links on Twitter, but I want to capture those links as well, which Twitter isn’t ideal for. I am still relying on Delicious and Evernote for the bulk of saving, but I thought I’d try something new to share with readers of Strange Attractor. Let me know what you think.
See on Scoop.it – Data journalism
Create great data-driven HTML5 presentations using Slidify, an R package for transforming RMarkdown to HTML using a variety of templates.
Merges presentation and data analysis using the open-source stats package, R to output HTML5 slide decks.
See on datacommunitydc.org
A year ago in April, I announced with much excitement that I would be joining the Media Development Investment Fund (then the Media Development Loan Fund) to edit the Knowledge Bridge website and provide digital editorial training and consulting for their clients. We launched the site in May last year in public beta and then properly in November of last year. The project had two pillars: to build a website to capture actionable intelligence about digital media for the independent news organisations that MDIF invests in and news organisations like them, and to provide digital consulting and training for MDIF clients.
A couple of weeks ago, the decision was made to redefine the project and focus the website more closely on supporting the consulting pillar of Knowledge Bridge with content such as client training and seminar materials.
“Unfortunately,” MDIF’s head of communications Peter Whitehead told staff, “the changes mean that the website no longer needs an editor with Kevin’s depth of digital experience.”
MDIF was a great experience and a great team. I learned a lot working with the fund and its clients about product-led thinking and product development. That built on the product development experience that Suw and I gained as we worked with the executive editorial team at Firstpost.com to refine and launch the ground-breaking digital news site in India. In my work with MDIF and as a consultant, I gained global experience working with clients in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the United States and Europe including Russia.
When I joined MDIF, I had just started to look for a full-time job, so I’ll pick up now where I left off last April. I might do some consulting and training while I search for the right job with the right organisation, but my ultimate goal is a full-time job with a news organisation or a digital media company. I bring almost two decades of experience in digital journalism in a wide variety of roles on staff with the BBC and The Guardian. As a digital strategist and journalism trainer, I have worked globally over the last three years for companies including Indian media giant Network 18, CNN International and Reed Business Information. If you’re not familiar with my background, you can check out my work history at LinkedIn. What you won’t see from that public profile on LinkedIn is the endorsements of my work.
From November 2010 through September 2011, I provided social media training for Al Jazeera English, Arabic, Balkans and Turk staff, both on-air and online. I also provided Al Jazeera online staff with general digital journalism training. Mohamed Nanabhay, then head of online for Al Jazeera English said of my work:
Kevin puts journalism into the internet and the internet into journalism – a rare skill in an industry where the trend is to focus on buzz words and shiny toys.
We hired him to train our newsroom on using social media for news gathering and production. His training was one of the reasons that our journalists were so well prepared to report on the events that unfolded in the Arab world in 2011.
Simon Rogers, the founding editor of The Guardian’s datablog and now data editor at Twitter, said of my work at The Guardian:
Some just know what the future looks like; Kevin is one of those people. Sharp, talented and farsighted, Kevin has played a vital, and under-reported role in Guardian.co.uk’s success, shaping the company’s digital vision, and producing fantastic journalism. The fact that he’s such a nice guy, well, that is a brilliant bonus.
As world editor of the BBC News website, Nic Newman was one of the three people on my interview board. Nic went on to work as the head or product development and technology for BBC News Interactive, where I worked for him to develop a strategic white paper on how BBC News could use blogging. He said:
Kevin was the BBC’s first online journalist in an overseas bureau. None of us knew what the role should be, but Kevin shaped it and made it work brilliantly. That is because he has an instinctive understanding of digital technology but also because he knows how to inspire and get the best out of journalistic colleagues. As with so much that Kevin did at the BBC, he was and is a pioneer, pushing the boundaries — but always with sense that technology serves journalism, not the other way around.
As I said, I am looking for a full-time editorial management, strategy or development position with a news organisation or digital media company. I have already applied for a number of exciting positions, both in the US and the UK, including editorial and strategy and development positions. We currently live in the UK. But as a dual US-UK citizen, I can work in both countries and both Suw and I are willing to relocate.
I have some scope to explore my options, and I want find the right job with the right organisation. If you have an opportunity that you think requires my skills, get in touch. We live in a time of great change and greater opportunity for journalism and digital media. I’m just as excited about the possibilities of digital media now as I was in 1996 when I got my first job in digital journalism, and I can’t wait to be a part of a new team.
If you want to talk, please drop me an email. I’m very much looking forward to hearing from you.
Ask most journalists about social media and they will immediately think of Facebook and Twitter, but social media is so much more than the major social networks. Humans are social creatures and whenever there is a new forum of communications there is almost always a social element. Online discussion forums began in the late 1970s long before the internet was available outside of the research and defence communities. Usenet and dialup bulletin board systems allowed people to discuss topics of personal and professional interest and, despite being overshadowed by modern social networks, many discussion forums remain vibrant hubs of conversation.
When I train journalists to use social media for newsgathering, I always make a point of mentioning online discussion forums because they can be extremely valuable if you want to reach professionals talking about something in the news related to their industry. My standard example is pilots discussing a plane crash like the Asiana flight 214 Boeing 777 crash over the weekend. If you want to see an example of how useful this can be, check out this summary by James Fallows of The Atlantic of pilots discussing the crash as well as an email from a reader. Fallows summarised the posts from PPRuNe, the Professional Pilots Rumour Network. The discussion is amazing detailed (and long, at 41 pages) with a series of rapid updates immediately after the crash. Of course, Fallows is an “instrument-rated pilot” so he brings quite a bit of knowledge to the post, and he helpfully translates some of the impenetrable alphabet soup used in professional aviation. Fallows says, “The opaqueness of the terminology is unfortunately typical of the Telex-era legacy coding of aviation announcements.”
It used to be a lot easier for journalists to find relevant conversations, as Google used to have a Discussions search that was focused on forums, but that now seems to have been rolled into Google Groups. It will still search Usenet groups and some mailing lists, but the search is not as comprehensive as Google Discussions once was. To search discussion forums, Boardreader seems to have very similar features to Google’s old Discussions search, so is probably the best place to search.
I always recommend that journalists know the online sources related to their beat, and this is a great reminder of looking beyond the usual suspects.
Note: If you want to see for yourself the breadth of discussion online about the crash, I’d recommend that you search for “Asiana Flight 214”. When I used the search term “Asiana 214”, for some reason Google thought I was looking for Asian porn.
Journalist and professor Carl Sessions Stepp celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first published story with a series looking at 50 lessons from his 50 years as a journalist in the American Journalism Review. In the final instalment of the series, he has a great call to action to revolutionise online content:
In many ways, we’re still in the hardware stage with digital journalism, still fixated on the tools. Journalists have lagged behind other entrepreneurs in imagining revolutionary content. Their momentum should accelerate into developing mind-boggling, irresistible, until-now-impossible information services for their readers. As we have already seen, if journalists don’t do this, others will.
In the past he says, progress in journalism relied on hardware, the platforms, from printing presses all the way through to the internet. Now, it is much more about software.
When Stepp says that we’re obsessed with the tools, I think he’s saying that we’ve been focused on platforms, and I think that is true. However, I have also seen enough digital techniques come and go that sometimes we become tools of our software tools too. How many editors are saying that they want their own Snowfall or Firestorm, their own immersive multimedia stories? Don’t get me wrong, I love immersive storytelling and some of the new techniques, but it’s always worth understanding which stories are appropriate for those techniques.
Fortunately, digital journalism has matured. When blogs were first popular, every journalist wanted a blog because a lot of them saw blogs as a short-cut to their own columns. They didn’t really see them as social media, just a digital incarnation of an existing format they understood. Now that digital has become a primary platform, rather than just another channel for distributing content originally crated for another platform, we’re seeing a lot more sophistication with digital storytelling.
That said, I know that Stepp is making a broader point, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with. It’s not just about telling stories in new ways. It is about delivering information and engagement in new ways. Although journalistic storytelling is my passion, I know that this is about thinking beyond stories to information services.
We are now seeing some great experiments in creating indispensable new information services. Mobile news service Circa is on to something. I’m not entirely convinced about breaking up stories in single screen swipes for mobile, but I think getting notifications about new developments on stories I would like to follow is something very interesting. Zite, which was acquired by CNN, is the first thing I open in the morning, and Watchup, the tablet app that lets me roll my own TV newscast, is my second.
All three of those groups are start-ups, but that doesn’t mean that traditional news organisations can’t create such innovative services. However, one of the hardest bits of software to manage in this process has been, and is, the culture of news organisations themselves. We already have a pretty good strategic template for rebooting a news organisation — the Newspaper Next project. Although few newspapers have followed the strategic advice that the project provided, we are seeing it in action with Clark Gilbert at the Deseret News where a core strategy is to develop print and digital separately. On a tactical level, we’re also seeing hack days and internal incubators. So companies are tackling some of these major cultural and organisational issues, but even Clark Gilbert is honest about the difficulty of this task.
I think it’s clear that we don’t have a choice but to do this hard work. Stepp is right if we journalists don’t do this, others will. But I know that journalists can and will do this.
Dipping through my morning digital media reading on Zite, I found a piece that put digital media success simply, though I’d argue overly simplistically. Josh Sternberg writing at Digiday, wrote:
Winning in digital media now boils down to a simple equation: figure out a way to produce the most content at as low a cost as possible.
Volume as a winning strategy is then taken as on faith throughout the rest of the piece. Sternberg goes on to say that publishers are turning to volume to “combat low ad prices”. But ad inventory oversupply has been one thing driving down digital ad rates, and pumping out more content exacerbates rather than solves that problem. As Justin Lewis said on Twitter:
@jeffjarvis thought from the piece – Combating low ad prices with more inventory is like combating low gold prices by opening a gold mine.
— Justin. You won't like me. (@Yoostin) July 1, 2013
I think that high content volume at low cost can be a good strategy for start-ups and some established brands: It has worked well for the Huffington Post and Forbes. But in the volume game, we’re going to see a few big winners and a lot of sites swimming in the deadpool. Consolidation will happen, although the lure of the media is so great that I’m sure that we’ll have quite a bit of churn with new content sites and apps being launched all the time despite a few big players owning most of the space. This is why the Daily Mail isn’t comparing itself to other newspaper sites but to internet giants like Yahoo and MSN, even if it has a way to go to get into that league. It’s a bold statement of how aggressively they are going to push the volume model. They started with a large base of readers and have simply adapted the skin-and-celeb model of tabloid journalism to the digital world, which isn’t that difficult to do.
However, it’s important to remember that volume of content is not the same as commercial success. The figures are a couple of years out-of-date (2010 data), but Ken Doctor looked at the average revenue per user (ARPU) of the New York Times and the Huffington Post. In it, he found that each of the 48 m global unique users at the New York Times was worth $3.54 versus 96 cents for each of the Huffington Post’s 31 m users. It would be very interesting to see the ARPU for the New York Times with its paid content strategy now firmly in place. The New York Times has struggled like most newspapers in developed markets over the last few years, but their paid content strategy is successful. As Ken says, a premium brands get higher returns than non-premium ones.
Digital paid content is also becoming a source of serious revenue for early paid content pioneers. In February of this year, the Financial Times announced that it has more digital subscribers than print subscribers, 316,000 versus 286,000. Jeff John Roberts at paidContent says, “But it’s hard to see how the FT case study can apply to anyone other than the FT.”
The FT has always been held up as an exception not an example for other, largely general interest, news publications, but dismissing its lessons out of hand is a mistake. However, the FT shows the counter-example to the volume strategy: 316,000 digital subs is peanuts compared to the millions of pay views, but it is proving to be a financially sustainable strategy.
More than that, publishers are moving beyond a two-pronged revenue strategy of ads or paid content. Most publishers, even the Daily Mail’s parent company, are developing multiple revenue streams to create a sustainable business, including events, digital marketing and development services and e-books just to name a few. There are other publications, such as The Atlantic, doing quite well that are pursuing different strategies.
And that’s only big traditional publishers. My former Guardian colleague Bobbie Johnson launched low-volume, high-quality science and tech publisher Read Matter after a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign. They must be doing something right. They were acquired by Ev Williams’ newest project, the blogging platform Medium, in April of this year.
You don’t have to play the volume strategy to win in digital, but you do have to find a way to translate your digital audience to revenue. That’s the big challenge, and thankfully, big numbers aren’t the only way to do that.
At the recent release of the Reuters Institute Digital News report, I got to catch up with an old friend and colleague, Alf Hermida. Alf and I worked together on the BBC News website back at the beginning. He was there right at the start and I joined not long after as the BBC’s first online journalist posted outside of the UK. It was a golden age of digital journalism, a rare opportunity to work for was was essentially a well-funded start-up inside of a big company. We had the resources (not limitless by any means) to experiment. We had the freedom and autonomy to really push the boundaries and create a new medium, and we had a team of managers, designers, developers and journalists all focused on one thing: Creating the future of journalism.
From 1998 to 2005, I enjoyed doing frontline journalism innovation with the BBC whilst based in their Washington bureau. We used big stories like presidential elections, the Oscars and the coverage after the 9/11 attacks to try new techniques including letting our audience set the agenda, 360 degree panoramas, webcasts and blogging. Long before smartphones and widespread mobile data, I made sure that I could take online journalism out from behind the desk and into the field. We were doing social and mobile journalism long before they were future of journalism buzzwords.
My role at the BBC in Washington was one of a number I’ve had where part of the job was to create a new position and work with my managers to figure out how it fit into the rest of the organisation. That last bit is really key and possibly the most challenging part of the innovation positions that I’ve had. As digital technology has become easier, more accessible and lighter weight, developing innovative journalism projects has become much easier, but the process of integrating innovation back into the beast is still hard work.
When I was in Washington, integration was a easier for a number of reasons. The Washington bureau of the BBC was exactly the right place to develop the position: It was small enough for me to easily work with my radio and TV colleagues, but well resourced enough that they had the time to work with me. I also contributed to radio and television coverage so it seemed natural that my radio and TV colleagues contributed to online coverage. The position developed into a multi-platform one organically.
The other thing that really worked at the BBC News website was that innovation was central to what we did and was driven by innovative managers. It wasn’t about sitting in Washington coming up with crazy dot.com era ideas, it was more about working collaboratively with editors and colleagues in London to refine and execute their and my ideas. One of the keys to the success of the BBC News website was its methodical way of testing and refining digital reporting and interactive presentation techniques. We had metrics for success and we built on the techniques that met those metrics.
I also learned what doesn’t work. In 2003, I was asked to do an innovation project in which I would be a backpack multi-media journalist. I had a digital video camera and I was supposed to help produce multi-platform video pieces. I had done video work before, but there is a long, steep learning curve between setting up a camera for webcasts or doing simple online video packages and shooting packages of sufficient quality for the main BBC news programmes. I did learn, however, and the video did reach the quality where it could be mixed into traditional packages. The big problem wasn’t the video but the lack of a process to use that video. The BBC was years away from multi-platform commissioning. A senior colleague suggested that we should have worked directly with a single programme, and we should have. That would have made things much easier and more successful. It would have more effectively integrated innovation into the traditional workflow in a much more manageable way.
The very next year, I blogged the 2004 election based on a suggestion from my managers in London. It started out as a test during the political conventions, and it grew and grew until I carried on through election day. It was a roaring success and it lead to my work in social media journalism for years to come. It was successful because it had a lot of support from London and my only regret, looking back, is that I didn’t simply carrying on blogging from Washington. However, I came to London in 2005 to write a strategic white paper on blogging which fed into a lot of other efforts across the BBC including efforts by BBC Scotland. Not long after, a blogs steering committee and blogs pilot was launched.
I soon realised that innovation works when it’s integrated into the organisation. I’ve had projects where, in essence, I’m been tasked with being innovative but had no real way to connect with colleagues. Predictably, while these projects might have been interesting, they didn’t have a lot of impact, either with the audience or with the rest of the organisation.
Having an innovation position sounds great on paper, but unless that position is properly integrated, it is unlikely to deliver the results the organisation wants. And from a career progression point of view, innovation positions often don’t have a clear chain of command and rarely have much advancement potential. It might sound great to be outside of the org chart and have the chance to break institutional logjams, but it rarely works. If you’re the new hire, you simply don’t have the political capital to break through the cultural blockages that have prevented the company from getting to where they want to be. In a sense, you are an innovation-shaped sticking plaster, you’re not the shot of antibiotics that’s really needed to change the direction of the organisation.
Fortunately, some things have changed in the three years since I last worked on staff at a news organisation. Digital teams have been built, through a lot of hard, persistent work. And I have deep respect for friends and fellow travellers who have fought the battles and paved the way for real, meaningful progress. But whilst I look back at my time with the BBC News website as a golden age of digital journalism innovation, I know that those organisations that have integrated innovation are now entering a new era where the gains will be more durable.
When you’re filled with enthusiasm and dying to get projects moving, working through such cultural and organisational issues is maddening. But over the last few years, I’ve worked with some organisations that have focused not just on innovative projects but also on changing their organisations. This is going to unleash even more innovation and a new golden age, and I can’t wait to be a part of it.
It is a measure of how well respected the Reuters Institute Digital News Report is in how much coverage it received. Most of the attention was focused on the rise in people paying for digital content, but there were a few things that leapt out at me including some fascinating figures of digital media use in Brazil and in-depth coverage of live blogs, news via smart TVs and digging into paid content trends.
Most of the last year, in my work with the Media Development Investment Fund, I’ve been focused on the development of digital media outside of North America and western Europe so I paid a lot of attention to statistics from urban Brazil.
With all of the talk about the ubiquity of Twitter in the UK, I would have expected more Brits to have turned to social media to access news than the report found. In the survey, 87 percent of Brits in the YouGov online poll said they turned to traditional news brands with only 31 percent saying that they had turned to social media and blogs.
What was more surprising was that out of the nine countries in the report, Brazil stood out for the highest percentage of respondents saying that they had accessed news via social media at 57 percent. Now, this was urban Brazilians. It would be interesting to see this broken out by rural versus urban populations in other countries just as a point of comparison. It would also be interesting to see research in countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, southeastern social media giants.
In another part of the survey, urban Brazilians were off the charts when compared with other countries in terms of participation around news – sharing, commenting, voting and rating. The survey found that 93 percent of Brazilian respondents participated with news in one of the 12 listed techniques. Again, I’d be interested to see if urban users in other countries used the internet in different ways that the population as a whole. (One other interesting thing about sharing news is how popular email remains to pass along news items.)
Working with a range of news organisations in the past three years, one area of intense interest has been live blogs. For newspapers, it allows them to play in the breaking news game with broadcasters. Live blogs, especially around major events, can be resource intensive, taking the time of a number of journalists. The question has always been: News organisations seem to like live blogs. Do audiences?
Neil Thurman with City University London answered that question emphatically. He wrote:
According to the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who oversees the UK’s second most popular newspaper website, live blogs outperform all other modes of online journalism.1 Such anecdotal evidence is supported by hard data showing that live blogs receive more visitors for longer periods of time than conventional articles or picture galleries on the same subject..
Live blogs are especially popular with heavy internet users, he said, and the survey found that 62 percent of UK respondents found them a “convenient way of following news while I am at work”. The other interesting finding is that the short, quick updates common to live blogs work well on mobile devices, a platform that 79 percent of news consumers in the UK used for getting their news fix during the day.
Thurman’s findings were largely positive, although he stopped short of saying that it was helping readers to become more interested in hard news and public affairs. He would say:
what we can say is that, because the format has developed uniquely for the web, and matches so well with readers’ consumption patterns, it seems to appeal as much through its form as its content.
For the past several years, I’ve been watching the development of smart TVs and other digital devices that bridge traditional television and the internet. I’m thinking far beyond IPTV and catch-up services and much more about internet services over TV screens. Traditional TV still commands a large percentage of attention in terms of media, and as Dan Brilot of YouGov points out, 97 percent of the UK population now has access to digital television. Brilot considers the possibilities of bringing internet content onto this popular and ubiquitous platform.
I have to admit, my enthusiasm for these services far outstrips their general popularity. In the US, about 9 percent have ever used a smart TV and about 4 percent have ever used a smart TV to access news. Smart TVs are much more popular in European countries such as Spain, Italy, France and Demark, with smart TV usage hovering around 15 percent. This is still pretty low in terms of use.
Brilot quotes Gartner statistics saying that by 2016 85 percent of all flat panel TVs sold will be smart TVs. My question is whether people will actually use these services. Last year, I was staying with a friend who had started his own internet company, he was totally unaware that he could connect his TV to his home network.
In that vein, I don’t really find statistics looking at popular apps as all that relevant. So what if Facebook is really popular on smart TVs in the UK if only 10 percent of those polled ever had used a smart TV?
More interesting was the research looking at what types of apps would be popular based on polls in the France and the UK. On screen news alerts, I would assume similar to tablet or smartphone notifications were the most popular internet news format, followed by news video clips. News text and tickers were quite popular with French respondents with about 50 percent saying that they were interested in those kinds of apps. Weather maps were also popular in both France and the UK.
Brilot was surprised about the popularity of news alerts considering they would interrupt TV viewing.
One of the major issues with apps on smart TVs is fragmentation in the market. News providers don’t really have the resources to build apps for all of the platforms, and although Android set-top boxes are being sold, there is no one provider that dominates.
Paid content has become an important source of revenue for some news organisations such as the New York Times in the past few years, and the report looked at the growth of paid content over the last year. Those paying rose in some countries in the survey including the UK, France and the US, but it also fell in Germany and Denmark. In the UK, those paying rose by 5 percent to 9 percent of those polled. Sure, you can say that was almost double the rate of last year, but it is still a relatively small part of the audience.
Robert Picard did find that across all of the countries in the survey, of those who don’t pay, about 15 percent said that they would be willing to pay amongst all news consumers and almost 20 percent amongst “news lovers”.
However, as Nic Newman found, 50 percent of those surveyed said that they had paid for a newspaper in the last week but only 5 percent said that they had paid for digital content. Digital paid content is still a long way from being a mass behaviour.
One last thing I found interesting is that digital subscriptions were more common in countries where print subscriptions were the norm versus single copy sales, and in country where single copy sales were the norm, then users were more willing to buy digital day passes.
I do hope that next year that the Reuters Institute are able to expand their research to more emerging markets. It would be fascinating to compare across a wider range of markets, but even with these nine countries, there is a wealth of information. It’s great to back up or knock on their head a lot of assumptions about digital media audiences.
Alan Mutter categorised the shift from traditional advertising to digital advertising as ‘each versus reach’, and I think that speaks to changes in content as well as advertising in the digital era. Some of the problems with current digital strategies is that they rely on mass media thinking, and no where do I think this more evident than in social media or community strategies. Most still are mass media strategies, with the goal of creating undifferentiated large audiences instead of aggregating smaller, more focused audiences.
Create a focused conversation worth taking part in, and you’ll develop a loyal, focused audience too. It will make not only make a better community, but a focused audience is easier to sell to advertisers too.
If you want to see a master in the art of host of an online conversation and creating a focused audience, it’s worth checking out Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at the Atlantic. He has a great interview with NPR’s On the Media, How to create an engaging comments section. The first thing to notice is that it takes a lot of work, which I think is why most media just opt for punching the biggest, baddest trolls in the pit. It’s easy, and it is like a shot of meth for page views.
Coates on the other hand has decided that rather than a troll pit, he wants to play host to a dinner party, and as he says:
I try to keep the conversation interesting, in terms of what is the bane of all comments sections, and that is, you know, rude commentary, people going over the line, trolling, that sort of thing. I generally follow the same rules, so I always tell people, if you were in my house and you insulted one of my guests, I would ask you to leave. I don’t understand why it would be any different in a comments section.
Amen, and I think most journalists would agree with that. He moderates his comments pretty aggressively, possibly a bit more aggressively than I would. However, I long ago stopped buying the argument that moderating comments is tantamount to censorship. Freedom of expression should not be used as an excuse for freedom from civility.
However, Coates isn’t arbitrary in deleting comments. His rules?
You can’t call people names. I mean, you can’t say, listen, you idiot. You can’t change the topic because you don’t like the discussion. It’s like, y- you’re more curating comments. So what you’re trying to do is present a conversation that’s interesting, not for everyone but for a certain small group of people.
There is a somewhat absolutist argument about freedom of expression on the internet that one should be free to say whatever one wants and act in any way one wants. However, we have norms of behaviour and conversation in real life, and I personally have always applied to them my online behaviour. I have one standard of behaviour online, in print and in real life. Do I want to impose those standards on everyone? No, but as the host of a conversation, I do retain the right to say those are the ground rules for the conversation that I’m trying to have.
I also like how Coates interprets freedom on the web. He says:
But the beauty of the Web is that whatever my comments section is, it’s not the Internet. So if that’s not what you want, you can go somewhere else.
This is key, and a key shift in thinking in terms of digital. You don’t have to be all things to all people. Actually, being something very important to a smaller, defined group of people offers more chance of success. The Atlantic is succeeding because it is building a team of people like Coates who have distinctive voices and are able to create their own definition of community online.
James Fallows, one of the smartest writers in Washington, is another example of a personal take on engagement at The Atlantic. He doesn’t have comments on his pieces, and he has explained why, twice in fact. In his biography on The Atlantic site, it says, “If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a “Comments” field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.” That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t engage with people. He does accept comments but via email., and he’s actually held a few AMA discussions on Reddit.
I think this is one of the secrets of The Atlantic’s success, both editorially and commercially. It has hired smart engaging writers who want to engage. The fact that they engage in their own ways show they value engagement but have found a way that works for them. Engagement is the goal, but as Coates and Fallows show, there are a number of ways to get there.
For news organisations to survive and thrive, they have to understand their competitive advantage and the relative competitive advantage of different digital strategies. I was reminded how important this is when I read a great article by Anika Gupta, the product manager for Citizen Journalist Online, a new user-generated content portal for Indian news channel CNN-IBN. Writing on MediaNama, Gupta points out that free content is not the competitive advantage for user-generated content:
Either you pay content producers or you pay content editors, but somebody has to get paid. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Even if you don’t have a portal, it still takes time, someone’s time, whether that’s a social-media savvy reporter or editor or a dedicated team and portal. She writes about the challenges of “polishing” UGC, making sure the content is spelled correctly while also retaining the voice of the user. She works for a citizen journalism or UGC portal, and there are also issues of filtering and verification. If your UGC portal is even mildly successful, you also run into scaling issues. You receive more content than you can use much less evaluate. The ability to filter relevant content can become huge even before you have to assess whether it’s accurate. This is all to say that user-generated content, especially done right, might be less expensive than original content but it is far from free.
If free content isn’t the competitive advantage for user-generated content, what are its true competitive advantages:-
Become the go-to news organisation for UGC
Of course, as Gupta points out, tapping into UGC allows news organisations to get photos and videos from a much wider range of sources. It is impossible to anticipate breaking news events, but now, many of the first bits of footage we see come from mobile phones. However, to gain an advantage over your competitors, you need to have already established your news organisation as the outlet where people will send their photos, videos and first person accounts.
Long before the BBC created its UGC hub, the BBC News website (where I worked from 1998 until 2005), had long been engaging its audience to help it report the news. The BBC had a couple of journalists who monitored and verified photos and emails that came mostly via an email address put on the bottom of stories. However, this allowed the BBC to develop a relationship with its audience so that when big news stories broke, members of the public would send their photos, videos and first person accounts to the BBC. That became a huge competitive advantage for the BBC even in early 2000s, long before many outlets had even realised the opportunity.
“Nothing beats local content”
This is a huge competitive advantage for local news operations, and one which a lot of local news groups have yet to fully embrace. As Gupta says:
A blog post by your neighbor will always feel more authentic than a TV news story by an unknown anchor who has visited your town once. People are drawn to what they know.
Build up a group of core contributors over time
Al Jazeera is relaunching its UGC portal, Sharek, and one of their goals with the new site is to allow them to more easily identify consistent, credible contributors over time. Developing an effective UGC strategy means building up a relationship and sourcing information about those contributors. This will make it easier to evaluate material in a breaking news situation because you will develop confidence with frequent contributors.
Make sure there are ways to reward those contributors. A couple of years ago, the local version of freesheet Metro in Finland actually listed the price they paid for high quality user photos on the photo itself. However, the reward doesn’t need to be monetary. The BBC’s interactive radio programme World Have Your Say (I was on the launch team) developed ways that active members of their community could take on informal roles in helping the show, whether that was with community management or suggesting show topics.
Increased audience loyalty
Most newspapers in developed digital markets boast a larger digital audience than a print audience. However, many of these visitors read a single story per month and can’t really be considered a core audience. Again, this type of engagement is not free. It takes a lot of time from smart social media staff who blend traditional journalism skills such as evaluating sources and verification with community management skills.
The deeper your engagement and UGC strategy, the more savvy news organisations will have to become with their business strategy to support it. This goes back to Gupta’s original point: UGC isn’t free. UGC and engagement strategies have often been poorly thought as editorial products, with the primary emphasis being on tapping low or no-cost content. The Guardian recently launched its new citizen journalism project, GuardianWitness, with a partnership deal with mobile phone operator, EE.
For local news sites, I still believe, even in the age of Facebook, that there are opportunities to develop deeper relationships with their communities through user-generated content. One of the big issues with these local strategies is that they need to represent a much broader range of the lived experience of local communities and not just focus on hard and breaking news. The national newspapers (and national journalists) love to poke fun at what they see as boring parochial news stories, but local food, fêtes and sports are part of that lived experience. News sites that become truly woven into the fabric of the fabric of their communities will have a better chance of attracting the loyal audiences that advertisers want. Building up a loyal audience of community contributors will also help news organisations gather the kind of user data that is critical to modern, targeted advertising.
That again, will take investment. I think that local and regional newspaper groups in the US and UK are facing what could be their last opportunity to adapt their editorial and, just as crucially, their business model to the market they find themselves in. It’s not clear that many of the hollowed out groups have the money, the stomach and the smarts to make targeted strategic investments. They might think that UGC is the way to pad out the skeletal products left by years of savage cuts. They should think again.
